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Published: July 22nd 2006
La Paz is the worlds highest capital city at a altitude of 3,600. That means three things. First the city is in the Guinness book of world records, second it's cold and third you are out of breath if you walk up two stairs or a steep road of which they have plenty here.
Not much to report from here as I spent most of the time either shopping, trying to send a parcel home, in my hotel room in my bed trying to get rid of the cold I got at Lake Titicaca or sitting in internet cafes writing travel blogs.
My hotel is quite nice and I even have international cable TV but when you step out you feel like you are in Israel. The area around the hotel was completely taken over by Israelis and you find at least three hotels (including mine) which specifically and nearly only cater for Israelis, more than two Israeli restaurants and all the shops and stores have signs up in Hebrew. You can even get a kosher pizza!
When I came back from the mountain bike ride I stepped into mayhem made in Bolivia. I'm not talking about normal live and traffic in La Paz which is mayhem enough. There was an Carnival going on. No tourist knew what it was a about but it went on for 18! hours from early in the morning to very late at night. Many of the participants wore very funky masks, short skirts or the traditional outfit including the bowler hat. As mentioned it went on for hours but somehow they decided to have one dance they all do. You could see many different groups with different outfits but they all did the same simple dance. They must have done it for hours on end as the parade went through most of the old city. I was bored watching it after 30 minutes.
I also did something for my education and went to the small but excellent Coca museum. There a group of people have made an effort to set the record straight about Coca plants and Cocaine. The main point is that Coca leaves (not Cocaine) have been used for many centuries in most South American countries. That all was well until some scientist from Europe or America extracted the Cocaine from the leaves. In the beginning everything was fine and Cocaine was used in many anaesthetics (as the synthetic version is today) and was for some time even freely available in Europe and America. The word Coca in Coca Cola really comes from the Coca leaves that are used to produce it even today! They just filter out the cocaine these days but the original formula contained it. The problem with the Coca leaves today is that they can be quite valuable if you extract the Cocaine and sell it to Europeans and Americans. Coca leaves are freely available in Bolivia and some parts of Peru, are a part of daily life and completely legal. Now you have the problem that its on the one hand legal to grow but you big neighbour up north would like to eradicate all fields. Good luck Bolivia.
Oh and then there was football. I watched two of the Australia games here with a surprisingly big number of Australians. We had a crowd of at least 30 Australians for the last game against Croatia and the atmosphere was fantastic.
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